The disclosure relates to the field of process flow applications and, more particularly, to a graphical software developer's tool that adds compensation functionality including an ability to specify compensation actions and compensation scope to process flow applications.
A process flow application is a composite business program choreographing data exchanges between service blocks, representing the various software applications that participate in an electronic business process. These various software applications represented by the service blocks often operate on different platforms and/or from different network locations (i.e., external to the business network). Process flow applications provide a high-level approach for managing business process across multiple, disparate software systems.
A current approach to handling compensation (e.g., to compensate for unexpected results or error conditions) within process flow applications is to manually add logic using text-based code entered via a text editor. This logic would detail necessary steps for performing compensation checking and related actions, when process flows execute. Additionally, manual code for handling error scenarios related to compensation logic has historically been needed. For example, compensation logic typically is manually entered to an information management system (IMS) synchronous callout application, which goes outbound to an external server to handle an error scenario. Manually entering compensation logic can be a time consuming and costly endeavor. For example, it is not uncommon for customers to need to change hundreds or even thousands of IMS applications to perform function calls with compensation checking and actions.